All governments lie, but disaster lies in wait for countries whose officials smoke the same hashish they give out.

I.F. Stone

maandag 7 november 2016

Frank Westerman's Provinciale Schrijverij 34

Shortly after the first presidential debate, former Obama adviser David Axelrod said on CNN that the commander in chief ‘can send armies marching and markets tumbling.’ Investors, it seems, are being reminded of this as polls show Hillary Clinton’s numbers dropping. The S&P 500 (‘s werelds belangrijkste instituut dat informatie levert over de risico's die kredietverschaffers lopen. svh) was down Friday for the ninth straight day, something that hasn’t happened since 1980. ‘The U.S. elections are the elephant in the room for markets,’ Julius Baer’s head of research (Zwitserse groep privé-banken. svh)Christian Gatticker told Bloomberg.

American corporations obtained great profits from financing the Third Reich, only to start supplying weapons and munitions to its anti-Hitler allies later on…

Today, the US economy has stumbled yet again, with Washington’s national debt reaching the unbelievable sum of 19.5 trillion (or 108% of GDP). And it’s hardly a secret at this point that war is the best remedy for all of these problems.

So is it any wonder that war has become the trump card of the White House in recent years, which is actively being played in the Middle East, Asia, Africa and other regions.

As for Europe, it is being plunged in the tide of fascism once again, with Washington hoping that it can spark a civil conflict that would transform the Old Continent in an arena for a new Major War. That is why we are witnessing the glorification of fascism in the Baltic States, and Ukraine, which has a ‘special role’ assigned to it in the future conflict.

after 1991 the Soviet Union broke up, it went really neoliberal, and Putin is basically a neoliberal. So there is not a clash of economic systems, as there was between capitalism and communism. What America objects in Russia is that Americans could not buy control of their oil, could not buy control of their natural resources, could not buy control of their public utilities and charge economic rent and continue to make Russia the largest stock market-boom in the world as it was from 1994 to 1998, when a financial crisis broke out in Russia. So the conflict is not one of economic systems, it is simply: America wants to control other countries, keep other countries within the dollar orbit, so that the whole world saves in the form of dollars, meaning: savings by buying treasury-bonds,

We’ll bomb you, make you look like Syria and Libya if you don’t turn over your oil, your pipe-lines, your public utilities (water, elektriciteit, openbaar vervoer, etc. svh) to American buyers so that we can charge rent, we can be absentee landlords, because we can conquer the world financially instead of militarily. We don’t need an army to occupy, we can use finance and the threat of warfare by bombing you to achieve our goals. It’s all about who is going to control the worlds natural resources, water, real estate, utilities and not about economic systems anymore.

it is worth pushing the world back to the Stone Age if it doesn’t let us, me, Hillary tell the world how to behave. That is the danger to the world, and that is why the Europeans should be terrified of Hillary Clinton, and terrified of the direction America has taken. We want to control the world. It is not through a different economic philosophy, it is control of the world through ownership of land, natural resources and essentially government through a monetary system.

The result of all this is a lower voting turnout during elections. People will prefer simply not to vote, because there is not really a third party in America. The Republicans and Democrats are both financed by Wall Street, the real estate interests, the monopolies. There is no alternative and that is exactly the objective of control, to create a society in which there is no choice. This is what the ‘free market’ is all about preventing any choice by the people themselves.

The Romney campaign has retained Mr. Kagan as a foreign-policy adviser, and according to news reports, President Obama has read and been influenced by a recent Kagan essay in The New Republic, which addresses 'the myth of American decline' and underscores the importance of the United States’ maintaining its 'global responsibilities.'

Mr. Kagan’s sometimes shaky reasoning is combined with a failure to grapple convincingly with crucial problems facing America today, the very problems that observers who worry about American decline have cited as clear and present dangers, including political gridlock at home, falling education scores, lowered social mobility and most important, a ballooning deficit…

Mr. Kagan hops and skips around such issues, placing way more emphasis on the military aspects of power as a measure of a country’s health and global sway. For instance, of the burgeoning financial clout of China — which already holds more than $1 trillion in United States debt — Mr. Kagan asserts that it has implications for American power in the future 'only insofar as the Chinese translate enough of their growing economic strength into military strength.' […]

This volume is peppered with vague lines like 'many believe that wars among the great powers are no longer possible,' or 'it is a common perception today that the international free market system is simply a natural stage in the evolution of the global economy.'

was a co-founder of the Project for the New American Century. More recently, his book The World America Made has been publicly endorsed by US President Barack Obama, and its theme was referenced in his 2012 State of the Union Address…

The Bush administration viewed NATO's historic decision to aid the United States under Article 5 less as a boon (zegening. svh) than as a booby trap. An opportunity to draw Europe into common battle out in the Hobbesian world, even in a minor role, was thereby unnecessarily squandered.

But Americans are powerful enough that they need not fear Europeans, even when bearing gifts. Rather than viewing the United States as a Gulliver tied down by Lilliputian threads, American leader should realize that they are hardly constrained at all, that Europe is not really capable of constraining the United States.

On the all-important question of power – the efficacy of power, the morality of power, the desirability of power – American and European perspectives are diverging. Europe is turning away from power, or to put it a little differently, it is moving beyond power into a self-contained world of laws and rules and transnational negotiation and cooperation. It is entering a post-historical paradise of peace and relative prosperity, the realization of Immanuel Kant’s ‘perpetual peace.’ Meanwhile, the United States remains mired in history, exercising power in an anarchic Hobbesian world where international laws and rules are unreliable, and where true security and the defense and promotion of a liberal order still depend on the possession and use of military might. That is why on major strategic international questions today, Americans are from Mars and Europeans are from Venus: They agree on little and understand one another less and less,

In recent years, the phrase ‘American exceptionalism,’ at once resonant and ambiguous, has stolen into popular usage in electoral politics, in the mainstream media, and in academic writing with a profligacy (mateloosheid. svh) that is hard to account for. It sometimes seems that exceptionalism for Americans means everything from generosity to selfishness, localism to imperialism, indifference to ‘the opinions of mankind’ to a readiness to incorporate the folkways of every culture. When President Obama told West Point graduates last May that ‘I believe in American exceptionalism with every fiber of my being,’ the context made it clear that he meant the United States was the greatest country in the world: our stature was demonstrated by our possession of ‘the finest fighting force that the world has ever known,’ uniquely tasked with defending liberty and peace globally; and yet we could not allow ourselves to ‘flout international norms’ or be a law unto ourselves. The contradictory nature of these statements would have satisfied even Tocqueville’s taste for paradox.

The reasons for the transatlantic divide are deep, long in development, and likely to endure. When it comes to setting national priorities, determining threats, defining challenges, and fashioning and implementing foreign and defense policies, the United States and Europe have parted ways.

Augustus was sensible that mankind is governed by names; nor was he deceived in his expectation, that the Senate and people would submit to slavery, provided they were respectfully assured that they still enjoyed their ancient freedom.

A number of things need to be recognized. One, the relationship between Ukraine and Russia will always have a special character in the Russian mind. It can never be limited to a relationship of two traditional sovereign states, not from the Russian point of view, maybe not even from Ukraine’s. So, what happens in Ukraine cannot be put into a simple formula of applying principles that worked in Western Europe, not that close to Stalingrad and Moscow. In that context, one has to analyze how the Ukraine crisis occurred. It is not conceivable that Putin spends sixty billion euros on turning a summer resort into a winter Olympic village in order to start a military crisis the week after a concluding ceremony that depicted Russia as a part of Western civilization… breaking Russia has become an objective; the long-range purpose should be to integrate it.

We lead our everyday lives in an environment of beeps and flashes, synthesized voices and video displays, the sounds and sights of miraculous machines that promise to do all kinds of labor and provide all kinds of excitement. The machines can make us feel omnipotent and helpless, supremely important and wholly insignificant, masters of our destiny and slaves of our own creation. Amid this confused interplay of power and alienation, the computer has also merged, in more ways than any single person can possibly know, with our weapons and superweapons.

According to the Constitution of the United States, only Congress — the representatives of the people — can decide to initiate and declare war. But intercontinental bombers armed with thermonuclear weapons stripped Congress of this Constitutional prerogative (recht. svh). With only several hours between launch and devastation, the decision was in effect placed in the hands of the President, perhaps to be made in such bizarre scenarios as Fail-Safe and Dr. Strangelove.

Or perhaps not so bizarre. In 1957, the Strategic Air Command had placed a nuclear strike force on permanent fifteen-minute alert at all its bases. SAC acknowledged in April 1958 that it had actually launched its nuclear-armed bombers toward the Soviet Union many times because of misinterpreted meteors, 'interference from high-frequency transmitters,’ unexplained ‘foreign objects’ ‘flying in seeming formation,’ and various other events. That year, while flying as a SAC navigator and intelligence officer, I participated in some of these launches and learned why they had occurred. One was actually caused by a flight launches and learned why they had occurred. One was actually caused by a flight of SAC's own B-52s failing to identify itself as it penetrated the Distant Early Warning (DEW) line in the Canadian Arctic and then again as it crossed the MidCanada Line. Another launch was initiated when an intruder shot and killed a guard at a ‘Special Weapons’ (in other words nuclear bombs) storage area on a SAC base, triggering SAC’s paranoid fears of a full-scale attack by Communist saboteurs. Since it would have taken hours for the bombers to reach their Soviet targets, and since the Soviet Union at this time actually had no operational intercontinental bombers amor missiles that could reach the United States, the SAC bombers could be safely recalled without initiating World War III.

The intercontinental ballistic missile diminished the decision-making time much further, to thirty minutes. Then, although Congress still had the only legal authority and the President still had the only publicly acknowledged authority, the actual authority to launch thermonuclear war in certain circumstances had to be decentralized and delegated to numerous military officers. For if only the President or his legal successors or a surviving military command center had the power to order a nuclear attack, nuclear retaliation could be prevented by a ‘decapitating’ first strike — such as even a single thermonuclear warhead on Washington — that eliminated all those authorized to give the orders. The submarine-launched ballistic missile reduced the possible time between launch and impact to ten minutes or less and led to the delegation of launch authority under certain conditions to the three top officers of each nuclear-armed submarine.

This is all part of the implacable logic of nuclear deterrence or Mutually Assured Destruction. Why? Because of that scary term ‘Assured.’ If one side attacks — or is perceived to have attacked — the other side must launch within minutes or risk having its retaliatory capabilities neutralized. As the strategists say, ‘Use 'em or lose ‘em.' The original attack must first be perceived, mainly by satellites, which of course are highly computerized. The information must then be coded, transmitted, and interpreted, at each stage mainly by computers and equipment run by computers… The command and control system not just of America but of any nation maintaining a nuclear strike force consists largely of computer hardware and software…

The roles that automatons play in the command and control of nuclear weapons are more frightening than most people realize, since the essential information is highly classified. As each new superweapon shrank the decision-making time and made the human command structure more vulnerable, more reliance was placed on automation. As early as 1970 the United States had deployed an automated system for ordering full-scale nuclear war. This doomsday apparatus was known by the innocuous name of ERCS (Emergency Rocket Communications System). For at least a decade, few people were aware of its existence. Then, in 1980, a small item buried in a three-hundred-page Air Force procurement document requested the piddling sum of $18.7 million for electronic replacement parts of the 'Emergency Rocket Communications System, MN-16525C,’ needed because of the ‘aging of the system.’ This led to the disclosure that eight of the Minutemen missiles ready for launch in Missouri silos contained, in place of warheads, robot transmitters programmed to send the current attack signal to the U.S. nuclear strike forces. On an electronic command from an airborne Air Force command plane, these missiles would launch and their robot transmitters would order the apocalypse.

Much worry about automated command has focused on the menace posed by accidental or hair-trigger decisions initiated by faulty hardware or software, unforeseen natural events, or bloopers in the interface between humans and computers. The history of command and control show good reason to worry…

The monstrous alien weapons we created have reversed the entire process of evolution, reducing the human species to a single repulsive (weerzinwekkend. svh) sluglike (slakachtige. svh) alien monster… This image embodies what we may become if we do not regain human control of our own creative powers.

in which information, ideas, or beliefs are amplified or reinforced by transmission and repetition inside an ‘enclosed’ system, where different or competing views are censored, disallowed or otherwise underrepresented.

The election of Obama in 2008, following the self-dissolution of PNAC (Amerikaanse inmiddels ontbonden neoconservatieve denktank, uitgesproken voorstander van de illegale inval in Irak. svh) several years earlier, left a widespread impression that the neoconservative hold on U.S. foreign policy had been broken, for the most part by disillusion with the results of the war in Iraq. Yet Obama has gradually come to adopt the PNAC line, albeit with seeming reluctance. His first Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, however, has positioned herself as their new darling.

In July 2014, billionaire Haim Saban declared in a Bloomberg TV interview that he would contribute ‘as much as needed’ to elect Hillary Clinton in 2016. This is significant because both Saban's fortune and his zeal (ambitie. svh) seem to be inexhaustible. Saban declares proudly that his greatest concern is to protect Israel through strengthening the United States-Israel relationship. ‘I'm a one-issue guy, and my issue is Israel.’ If Americans in general can see no urgent use for the nation's enormous military power, the use is obvious for someone like Saban, with dual Israeli-U.S. citizenship: the strengthening of Israel's position in the Middle East.

Saban sees three ways to be influential in American politics: make donations to political parties, establish think tanks, and control media outlets. Although he lost his bid to buy the Los Angeles Times in hope of changing its ‘pro-Palestinian’ line, in 2002 Saban showered seven million dollars on the Democratic National Committee, donated five million dollars to Bill Clinton’s Presidential Library, and above all, founded his very own think tank, the Saban Center for Middle East Policy within the Brookings Institution, previously considered the most politically neutral of major Washington think tanks. This was accomplished by a record donation to Brookings of thirteen million dollars. The Saban Center fosters (bevorderen. svh) dialogue, not between Israelis and Arabs, of course, but between Israelis and American decision-makers.

While betting on the Democrats, Saban picks favorites, as illustrated by this anecdote:

‘Obama was asked the same question Hillary was asked — “If Iran nukes Israel, what would be your reaction?” Hillary said, “We will obliterate them.” […] Four words, it's easy to understand. Obama said only three words. He would “take appropriate action.” I don't know what that means.’

Saban's rant continued, calling Iran ‘a rogue state... that is a supporter of Hezbollah, which killed more Americans than any other terrorist organization,’ etc. In short, Hillary passed the test, but Obama flunked (voor een examen zakken. svh). Neither one of them would ever dare say what former French President Jacques Chirac replied years ago to the same question, by observing that should Iran dare attack Israel, Teheran would be wiped out by Israeli’s nuclear arsenal, which was a way of pointing out the absurdity of the scenario. For pointing this out, Chirac was attacked by France's pro-Israel press, a risk no leading American politician would ever dare to take — not with moneybags like Saban waiting in the wings.

We are now spectators of the latest — and perhaps penultimate — chapter of the 60 year old conflict between Israel and the Palestinian people. About the complexities of this tragic conflict billions of words have been pronounced, defending one side or the other. Today, in face of the Israeli attacks on Gaza, the essential calculation, which was always covertly there, behind this conflict, has been blatantly revealed. The death of one Israeli victim justifies the killing of a hundred Palestinians. One Israeli life is worth a hundred Palestinian lives. This is what the Israeli State and the world media more or less — with marginal questioning — mindlessly repeat. And this claim, which has accompanied and justified the longest Occupation of foreign territories in 20th-century European history, is viscerally racist. That the Jewish people should accept this, that the world should concur, that the Palestinians should submit to it — is one of history's ironic jokes. There's no laughter anywhere. We can, however, refute it (ertegen protesteren. svh), more and more vocally. Let's do so.

Everything that happened, happened here first, in rehearsal. The invasion of Beirut, the first and second Intifada, the Gaza withdrawal, the Battle of Falluja; almost every one of Israel's major military tactics in the Middle East over the past three decades was performed in advance here in Chicago, an artificial but realistic Arab town built by the Israeli Defence Force for urban combat training.

US warcrimes,Obama's warcrimes,crimes against humanity that following the Nuremberg trials would be punished with the death penalty.......another massacre in Afghanistan...US forces just killed at least 32 more civilians, many of whom were children."Of course, this is on top of all the wedding parties, hospitals, and other victims of US bombing attacks that have brought the death toll from US interventionism in Afghanistan to more than 200,000, not to mention the wounded, maimed, homeless, and refugees." "The military regrets the loss of innocent life but, they say, they didn’t really have a choice. If they didn’t fire the missiles, the US and Afghan troops would be killed. If they did fire the missiles, the innocent people living in the neighborhood would die. Not surprisingly, the military chose to protect the lives of the soldiers at the expense of those innocent people living in the neighborhood."